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I'm typing this from a Debian Lenny/Sid amd64 box (AMD X4 955BE, 8GB PC2-8500, MSI K9A2 Platinum) with a brand new Radeon 5870 in it. I've got the "Unsupported hardware" banner at the bottom right, but I've not run into any problems so far. I've been running Heroes of Newerth at 1680x1050, vsync off, with 8xAA and 32xAF on at >70FPS. X-Plane runs very nicely at 1680x1050 extreme res with 4xAA and 4xAF (not nudged it any higher yet), ETQW runs very nicely with 16xAF (>60FPS constant). This is with Catalyst 9.9.

I'm typing this from a Debian Lenny/Sid amd64 box (AMD X4 955BE, 8GB PC2-8500, MSI K9A2 Platinum) with a brand new Radeon 5870 in it. I've got the "Unsupported hardware" banner at the bottom right, but I've not run into any problems so far. I've been running Heroes of Newerth at 1680x1050, vsync off, with 8xAA and 32xAF on at >70FPS. X-Plane runs very nicely at 1680x1050 extreme res with 4xAA and 4xAF (not nudged it any higher yet), ETQW runs very nicely with 16xAF (>60FPS constant). This is with Catalyst 9.9.

The AIB vendor (which one BTW?) has the option of including a driver on the CD. Did you check?

The hardware became "supported" between the final packaging of Catalyst 9.9 and the next release. There may some bugs that you may still encounter that were resolved prior to the final release, but the 9.9 catalyst will be 95% "there". Beyond a few small corner cases, the driver should be representative of the performance of the card.

The AIB vendor (which one BTW?) has the option of including a driver on the CD. Did you check?

The hardware became "supported" between the final packaging of Catalyst 9.9 and the next release. There may some bugs that you may still encounter that were resolved prior to the final release, but the 9.9 catalyst will be 95% "there". Beyond a few small corner cases, the driver should be representative of the performance of the card.

Regards,

Matthew

XFX - I did check, but they've only got Windows 2k/XP and Vista/7 drivers on the CD.

I believe I encountered one of the bugs - this happened after I went to bed, and I've not been able to get an X server running this morning (without rebooting).

have you read the test on anandtech? The 5850 is blazing fast. There is no reason to buy a 4870 - except the prize...

Price *is* a big factor. The 5850 is around twice as fast as the 4850 in theory (a little less in practice, aside from in Far Cry 2), but 2.6x the price. I'm willing to pay a little extra for the performance, but if the 5800 series isn't well supported right away, I might as well get a 48X0 card and enjoy fast open-source 3D drivers sooner.

Originally Posted by GotenXiao

I'm typing this from a Debian Lenny/Sid amd64 box (AMD X4 955BE, 8GB PC2-8500, MSI K9A2 Platinum) with a brand new Radeon 5870 in it. I've got the "Unsupported hardware" banner at the bottom right, but I've not run into any problems so far. I've been running Heroes of Newerth at 1680x1050, vsync off, with 8xAA and 32xAF on at >70FPS. X-Plane runs very nicely at 1680x1050 extreme res with 4xAA and 4xAF (not nudged it any higher yet), ETQW runs very nicely with 16xAF (>60FPS constant). This is with Catalyst 9.9.

Thanks for braving ahead and getting a card you didn't even know would be functional under Linux!

Originally Posted by mtippett

The AIB vendor (which one BTW?) has the option of including a driver on the CD. Did you check?

The hardware became "supported" between the final packaging of Catalyst 9.9 and the next release. There may some bugs that you may still encounter that were resolved prior to the final release, but the 9.9 catalyst will be 95% "there". Beyond a few small corner cases, the driver should be representative of the performance of the card.

Regards,

Matthew

By "next release", I assume you mean Catalyst 9.10, right? I basically just want to know if the driver packaged with Ubuntu 9.10 will officially support the 5850.

Thanks for braving ahead and getting a card you didn't even know would be functional under Linux!

Since the 4800 launch, Linux has generally been either included in the release CDs (as mentioned before, AMD doesn't control this), or included in the follow-up catalyst release.

By "next release", I assume you mean Catalyst 9.10, right? I basically just want to know if the driver packaged with Ubuntu 9.10 will officially support the 5850.

Well, that's an extra variable.

Yes, Catalyst 9.10 should have the hardware enabled by default.

Now, for distributions, we typically do a 1-2 apprach. We look to ensure that at release there is a driver that _mostly_ works (in this case, the 8.660 driver pushed a month or so ago. There may be some quirks when the distro is released, but that is because the distribution may change in the intervening months or we may not have completed all development.

When the distro is formally released, within a month or two we have the "final" release, which contains our full development for that distribution _and_ should be matched to the final release of the distribution.

This does means things like projective transforms in RANDR1.3 get rolled in without much fanfare. (look at the --transform option in xrandr).

I just installed an HD5850 onto Ubuntu 9.10 and loaded the FGLRX driver from repository. Works fine with my Apple 23 Inch Cinema display (1920 X 1200/60) so far. Any way to remove the "unsupported hardware" watermark?